In 2001, FuturesTrader71 (FT71) left a successful career in engineering to pursue trading full time. After trading individual equities for a couple of years, he transitioned to trading futures in 2003. Eventually, FuturesTrader71 would start and run his own proprietary trading firm. Along with being owner, operator, and trader, he also developed and implemented the training program for the traders at his firm.

By the end of 2004, FuturesTrader71 also started getting more involved with the retail trading community via public trading forums. After seeing the obstacles faced by retail traders, he began using Twitter to actively interact with traders and started a blog in 2009. He posted his first webinar in October of the same year. He currently has over 60 webinars posted on his site. His increased involvement with retail traders led to creating a 4-part webinar series designed to address many of the same topics contained in his proprietary training process.

In 2011, FT71 took another step towards creating a retail trading experience that more closely resembled that found in a proprietary trading setting, when he became Executive Vice President of VanKar Trading Corporation. In November 2012, FT71 advanced those efforts when he created and became Managing Partner of a new brokerage, Stage 5 Trading Corporation. Along with risk monitoring and client interaction, Stage 5 implemented a structured learning environment for clients.

FuturesTrader71 started his trading career scalping individual equities. At the time, he traded via the DOM and relied on order flow. After experimenting with most of the traditional technical analysis tools, he began integrating Market Profile into his trading methodology as he migrated from scalping to short-term intraday trades. Leveraging some of the core concepts from Market Profile, he shifted his focus to Volume Profile.